How to end a trip

Faced with a limited selection of elliptical machine reading material, I resigned myself to a weekly periodical I'd shun in any other circumstance. I'd been in this situation before and mistakenly selected a magazine called OK. I thought OK was the poor man's People but soon learned OK is little more than a pastiche of 300 pictures of dresses. That's a hard lesson to learn two minutes into a 30 minute run with no other reading material in sight. As soon as I realized my mistake I started brusquely flipping through the pages trying to get past the dresses section, hoping the guy next to me noticed my air of revulsion. Actually, I'm not even sure it was OK magazine that I picked up. I just know that its major themes were weight gain rumors and parties I hadn't been invited to.

I knew that I was about to spend the next 30 minutes covertly pining after women stoically bouncing nearby. I needed a distraction so they'd stay just shy of being creeped out enough to leave their machine and sign up for a membership at Curves. So I settled on The Week. The Week. Seriously? People are writing articles for this and sending it out to the world? It sounds like a cruel country club bet where the winner came up with an idea more boring than The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. The kind of magazine with plenty of droll cartoons populated with obese men dressed in overcoats and monocles.

But to my surprise it did have an interesting news item. Apparently a woman from Brazil ran out of money on vacation in Bolivia. Left with no means to return home, she came up with this idea: Strip naked in front of a statue of Christ and hope for deportation.

That ought to do it. But nope, she got arrested and released within hours. She quickly realized the error of her methodology and did it again. As in later that same morning. A crowd gathered. (In my mind she's pretty hot with no discernible blemishes or tattoos.) This time Bolivia contacted Brazil.

Bolivia: Hey, is this Brazil?
Brazil: This is Brazil, how can I help you?
Bolivia: Listen, one of your peeps came down and she's naked in front of our Jesus statue.
Brazil: No shit. Is she hot?
Bolivia: I don't discern any blemishes or tattoos. Yeah she's decent.
Brazil: Nice.
Bolivia: We can't have guys getting worked up in front of Jesus Christ. You have to do something.
Brazil: Tell you what. Get her to the border and we'll send for a train.
Bolivia: Done. (Pause) I still think about you sometimes.
Brazil: Randy, don't start.

Anyway, that's basically what happened. She got a free ride home to Brazil by stripping naked twice. I can't think of anyone who didn't come out ahead in this situation. Do you think she knew this would work? Was it incredibly odd but effective intuition? Did she weigh the possibility her tactic would result in a prolonged jail sentence rather than a free train ticket? Is she imbalanced? Was she simply desperate? Or just someone who doesn't give a shit? I'd like to talk to her about it with a translator that knows when it's time to make himself scarce.